Pizza cutter handmade carved Sapele wood frame with decorative copper insert above crescent cutting blade; Brass & copper stand. 1910

Lot 1004 has been deaccessioned from the Sadakichi Hartmann Collection held by the University of California, Riverside and is now on offer to the public.

Carl Sadakichi Hartmann (b. 1867- d. 1944) was one of the first American photography critics, a poet, and a renowned anarchist of German and Japanese descent.

As an early participant and supporter in the modernism philosophical movement he was deeply influenced by the European Symbolist Movement and oriental literature. In 1905 he performed at Miner’s Theater in NYC, and frequented Lombardi’s where he shared pizza with other stage luminaries such Enrico Caruso, Trixi Friganza and Jack Norwood. (Note nexus to Lot 1007)

It is believed that while Sadakichi lived in Greenwich Village, he designed and commissioned this unique slicer to commemorate an unpublished haiku he wrote about a dragon that consumed the world.

He ate pizza and wrote haiku in English before such ideas became popular among the Imagist poets and wider literary circles in general.

Preceding his death in Florida, Hartmann spent the last years of his life in a cabin on the Morongo Indian Reservation near Banning, California.